toyota

One summer morning back when I lived in Talkeetna, Alaska, I had to leave my little cabin at 5am to be at the Toyota dealer in Anchorage by 7am so they could try to figure out why my RAV4 kept filling up with water every time it rained. Since it was summer, the sunlight at 5am was pretty much the same as it was at noon, which was always cool.

About twenty seconds after driving down the main road out of town — actually there’s only one road in and out of town, so it’s hardly worth referring to it as the “main road” — I came across a woman in a white dress walking on the lane divider stripes in the middle of the road, in the same direction I was driving.

I was reminded of that morning when I heard the song Chevy Van by Sammy Johns just now.

From reuters.com, “Toyota Motor Corp is considering making batteries for electric vehicles (EV) with Panasonic Corp, as it ramps up battery development to help meet its goal for green cars to comprise half of global sales by 2030.” Panasonic is currently the main battery supplier for Tesla.

I had my old RAV4 for about eight years. I bought it because Toyota supposedly had good quality, but I sold it on this date a few years ago because I had a lot of problems with that car, including the time it filled up with water shortly after I bought it.

Today represents a changing of the guard for me. The old Toyota RAV4 was both a good and bad experience, and today I traded it in for the official car of Colorado, a Subaru Outback. As you can see from the photos, the two cars are somewhat similar in design and color. (The top photo was taken in Coldfoot, Alaska, a very small “town” about halfway between Fairbanks and Deadhorse, Alaska.)

Like a lot of other people, I've had a problem with my 2006 Toyota RAV4 which can best be described as a throttle lag, hesitation, low power, acceleration, or stalling problem. In short, you press on the gas, and nothing happens, and in fact, the car seems to lose power or "bog down."

A second problem that may be related is that when I turn left or right through a large intersection, the RAV4 has the same lag/hesitation/stall/low-power problem.

Okay, sorry for this rant, but I have had a very bad experience with Toyota regarding my 2006 Toyota RAV4, and I'm upset about it.

My rant is short: The RAV4 I currently own was my first Toyota purchase, the overall experience has been very poor, and I've just spent three days trying to get this latest RAV4 problem resolved. Toyota acknowledges this problem is a design flaw, but now it turns out that Toyota's "customer care" people don't actually care.